“You’re right, Noni. It just gets me that if it weren’t for you-know-who, I’d be able to go to Gothic too, and we could share it.” They’d been through it all before, over and over.
Noni just looked down.
“Anyway, George says he can probably get me onto a new grant for next year. But he suggests that for now I try to content myself here in New Haven, caring for the great big blattids, and maybe get a publication or two out of them. I can swelter with a warm Schaefer while the rest of you are cooling with a Coors, and pray to Pan for Griffin’s imminent demise, promotion, or transubstantiation.”
There was nothing more to say. Noni had to meet her parents for a graduation dinner. They’d come to the brownstone portals of the cemetery. A golden moth the size of a turkey platter shone in the afternoon sun, mounted on the lintel of the Egyptian gateway. “Now there’s a lep worthy of your roaches,” said Noni. “Work on that.”
“George says it’s meant to symbolize resurrection, or—considering this lot of Puritans and Congregationalists—more likely decay. Anyway, congratulations, Noni dear. You’ve done well here. I’ll get out too someday. I hope you have a fine time. I’ll write.” He held her hand, and she held his.
“Your summer will go fast, you’ll see.” Her mouth did a bright red yo-yo to his and back, her strong, slender arms pulled him quickly into their saffron curve; then she pushed him away and she was gone. Her lithe form slipped beneath the portal, down the road toward Woolsey, and into the crowd of flapping gowns. She hadn’t looked back.
Now, in the middle of the night, James recalled that afternoon as he rubbed his shin in the dim light of Osborn’s tower. Noni’s absence and his latest contretemps with the surly Griffin ate at his gut like a roach gnawing on a stale biscuit. He clumped down the ladder from the tower to the fourth floor, down the stairwell to the third, second, and ground floors, and on to the basement. Focused purely on his funk, he failed to notice the stooped brown form in the cellar hallway until he collided with it. “Oh, I’m sorry!” he said. “Excuse me, I guess my eyes weren’t adjusted.”
The figure replied, “Not to worry, young man. No damage done. I’m just surprised to encounter anyone else down here at this time of night. Why . . . you’re Mr. Mead, aren’t you? George Winchester’s student?”
“Yes,” Mead said, surprised as well that the eminent professor emeritus recognized him. He knew the elder ecologist from his faithful appearance at departmental seminars, where he always stood to ask the crucial question of sweating speakers in a heavily accented British voice, sweet and creamy and mordant. “And you’re Dr. Hutchinson.”
“So I am. I see you are wondering what I am doing down here past the witching hour. Postgraduate students require no excuses for their nocturnal perambulations, which are often eccentric. But we of the pedantry are expected to behave, to keep regular office hours and routine home lives, watching television in the evenings and going round the shops on Saturdays. To come and go at respectable times and be found in predictable places—are we not?”
“Well, I don’t know about that, sir. But since you ask—are you running some sort of experiment down here?” Mead had heard that the eminent professor was most resourceful, often conducting significant research in the near vicinity of the campus. Perhaps he was currently engaged in observing the mice and silverfish that skitted through the lower gut of the lab’s corpus.
“No, I fear not!” The prof laughed. His height had never been the match of Mead’s, and his elder stoop took him well below six feet. Shoulders once broad now sloped, but solidly. He wore a shiny old brown suit and butterscotch plaid necktie, the whole mounted on ancient oxblood oxfords a thousand times polished. A January shock of bleached straw thatched Hutchinson’s crown, above a face of such kindness that Mead almost held his breath in its presence. Deep-set, clear blue eyes unaided by spectacles sat above several scoops of wrinkles around the weighty lids. An ample but chiseled nose perched between unsettled cheeks of a healthy rose. Strong jaws resisting the onset of jowls met in a delicate chin, and a tilde of a mouth completed the face.
Mead had noticed that mouth before. It seemed to have two basic, reversible expressions: a wistful, almost sad smile, and a downturned daub of surprise or dismay. Variations provided by the eyes and their snowdrift brows, the rise and fall of the barely furrowed forehead, and the tilt of head and its keel, the nose, met all situations.
“You see, Mr. Mead, I’ve had to move out of my laboratory of many years into smaller quarters, and rightly so, in order to accommodate a fine new faculty appointment: a case of ecological succession, as it were. But in so doing, I was obliged to turf out some ancient office furniture, such as these old map cases.” His liver-spotted but sure hand rested on a huge oaken cabinet. “One oughtn’t be sentimental about such things. But I’m just down here bidding them goodbye, you know—they’ve served me well for decades—and making sure I’ve left nothing in them. My memory is not what it was at seventy.”
Mead hoped his own memory would be as sharp at thirty. He was aware that Hutchinson was embarked on the fifth of a six-volume treatise on limnology: no task for an absent mind.
“Uh, oh—here, you see?” Hutchinson went on. “I have overlooked something!” He had opened a lower drawer and extracted a thin sheaf of papers. “Aha!” he said. “I’ve been wondering where these have been hiding! Most of my reprints are in good order, but these have been missing for ages.”
Mead recalled his one earlier meeting with the man, at a departmental reception for the publication of his latest volume. The honoree had dismissed himself from a conversational knot and disappeared beneath the Galapagos tortoise that served as a lintel for his office. The matter under discussion had been a small, pied Eurasian species of merganser called the smew, one of which had fetched up on the shores of Long Island Sound. Mead thought Hutchinson might be consulting a field guide to acquaint himself with the species. Moments later he emerged, bearing an old paper of his on ancient illuminated manuscripts. “Was it rather like this?” he had asked, pointing to the margin of the paper, where stood an elegant fourteenth-century illumination of a smew. Winchester told him later that if there was anyone who might be expected to have published something on any given subject, it would be Evelyn Hutchinson.
Now, in the dusky cellar of Osborn Lab, James wondered what the missing reprints could possibly concern, and he asked as much.
“Oh, just a little aspection of the salt marshes around Indian Neck in Branford, which I conducted nearly forty years ago. Do you know the area?”
Indeed he did, though he didn’t bother to mention that his view of Indian Neck had been largely through the bottom of a bottle of Schaefer.
Mead shook his head in wonder. “How is it, Professor, if I may ask, that you seem to have touched on almost every part of biology in your work? And a lot of other fields besides? I mean, how could one person do so much?”
“Well—” Hutchinson flushed a little at the run of questions but took it for sincere curiosity rather than flattery. “I’m not sure I’ve done quite so much as you seem to think I have. But remember, Mr. Mead, I am a year or two older than yourself. The studies—one’s enthusiasms, their results—they do add up over the years, you know. At least that has been my experience.”
“But when do you get the time to pursue them all?”
“That, Mr. Mead, is the one constant—it refuses to vary.” He tipped his head and smiled with a sad, heavy-lidded nod. “It’s merely a matter of how you use it. And, of course, I have had legions of helpful students.”
“Is that all?” James sounded disappointed.
“Perhaps there is one other thing.” Hutchinson sighed as he closed the drawer of the map case and shuffled the reprints. “Students seldom inquire about such matters anymore, and what I say may sound rather . . . archaic.”
Mead shook his head no, go on.
“Or maybe I am speaking out of turn, as you are Professor Winchester
’s advisee?”
“No, please. George—Dr. Winchester—has often said that I should take advantage of any opportunity I might have to speak with you. I would truly welcome any advice.”
“Well, it’s not so strong a thing as advice, I daresay. Just this: I have found that above all, one must follow one’s inclinations. The safe course seldom satisfies the mind in the long run. ‘Taking risks,’ I have noticed, is a popular phrase now among the young. But I suspect that few who utter it as a bromide know remotely what it means. In science and in letters, as in life itself, the rewarding course often proves to be the risky one, where the outcome is uncertain. With due intelligence and care, mind you—I’m not advocating foolhardiness or cavalier disregard for personal safety or responsibility.”
Mead had to listen carefully to dredge each word from Hutchinson’s clotted-cream speech, and he wasn’t certain he’d caught every inflection or the full import. “Just how do you mean?” he asked.
“For example, when I put forth the concept of the ecological niche, as it is commonly known and misused today, it was not exactly the conservative thing to do. Actually, both Grinnell and Merriam had elucidated similar ideas early on, not to mention Darwin. But I expanded the concept and applied it theoretically into the n-dimensional hyperspace. It met a great deal of resistance before acceptance, general approbation, and finally co-option into the culture at large.”
Mead nodded. Nowadays people spoke of their “niche” as blithely as they might say “lifestyle.”
“Or,” Hutchinson continued, “take a more recent case. I had a student, in fact my last, named Tim Lovelace—you’ve heard of him? I’m not surprised, he’s one of the most famous conservation biologists around, right up there with Jacques Cousteau.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of him in connection with tropical rainforests. What was his big risk?”
“Tim’s family wanted him to follow the ancestral calling of stocks and securities. But his heart, conscience, mind, and professor all urged him toward the Amazon instead of Wall Street. He went there, all right—studied the amphibians with all the verve he might otherwise have squandered on debentures—and you see where it got him. He redefined how we look at the rapidly vanishing tropical forests, and how animals and plants respond to the fragmentation of those forests. His studies are now widely affecting policy. Few individuals have had as much influence on conservation or impact on the land. But, Mr. Mead, I fear I’ve kept you overlong. Will I see you at the departmental seminar tomorrow?”
“I expect so, Professor. If I can wake up by then. Thank you!”
“Yes, well, you’ll be wanting to ascend to your battlement. Oh—I suppose I’m not meant to know about that. Well, good night!”
With that, the slumped brown shadow wheeled and receded down the dark hallway. Mead turned and punched the brass button that would summon the service elevator clunking down to his level. He was simply too tired to climb the stairs to his lair, and he still had a roach round to complete. At last he negotiated the ladder to the tower, and as he did, his head waggled like one of those doggies in the rear window of a ’59 Buick. He’d forgotten all about the Coke. Entering his turret roundel, he sank onto his pallet in a hot, sweaty blanket of confusion.
“Well, that really helps,” he complained to the tower’s bats, the ones that arrived in May and came and went all summer. “Noni says to live in the present and make the most of my time here. Professor Hutchinson advises me to follow my whims, more or less. Great! Just like the average horoscope—something for everyone.” As he tried to unscramble his brains, the bats squeaked and fanned his face with mothy wingbeats. That felt good, but their interpretation of the situation proved inscrutable. No help at all. He thought of Carson’s late-night homilies, to the effect that the best way to deal with wanderlust is to follow it. “And Doc Hutchinson’s counsel is pretty clear,” he told the whirling bats. “Have the courage of your convictions.”
With that, he dropped into a deep but troubled slumber. And when he awakened in the muggy cell, he ached all over. Carson’s journeys in the wild mountains made his brain ache with desire to be there as well, to track him down, to see Magdalena for himself. His heart ached over Noni already; what would it be like in three months? And his mother was an ache in a place he couldn’t name. As for Griffin, he was a specific pain in the ass. They all tugged, nagged, and smarted, and he wondered whether he’d be able to resist their collective westward push and pull.
He didn’t think he could. He couldn’t. Mead descended the ladder as soon as Tuesday morning pulled itself out of its sleeping bag of thick and woolly East Coast air. Then he walked downtown to the Greyhound depot and purchased a one-way ticket to Gunnison, Colorado.
That evening, when he’d finished his pastoral visit to the roach room, Mead went in search of Steve Manton and shanghaied him to Clark’s Dairy for a malt. Entering the old campus hangout, they claimed a pair of curl-backed chairs on either side of an aluminum table. Mead rested his elbows on the worn, swirl-patterned Formica of the tabletop and waited for a menu. A robust waitress in a lime-green uniform emerged from behind the green faux marble counter and plopped menus, water glasses, napkins, and silverware before them. “What’ll it be, bubs?”
“Hi, Stella,” said Mead. Manton studied the menu as if he’d never seen it before. Mead, the menu committed to memory, studied the schmaltzy repro of a Swiss alpine oil on the wall beside them. Like everything else these days, it reminded him of Colorado.
“Uh, a double order of fries, please, and a root-beer soda.” Steve ordered as if he were selecting the oysters Rockefeller and a suitable Semillon.
“Just a chocolate malt and a BLT for me, Stella,” James added. “One bill, on me.”
“You got it, bubs.” Torturing her gum, the waitress scribbled the orders and padded back into the streamlined, key-lime and stainless steel world of the grill, toasters, malt makers, and glass racks behind the long U of the fountain bar. Her movements were as smooth, predictable, and anachronistic as the revolutions of the soda mixer itself. Mead had the sense that when these two finally wore out, they’d be making no more like them. Stella held the holders of endowed chairs in no greater awe than undergrads—in other words, none. Manton said she reminded him of his aunt, who’d waited tables to put his uncle through law school at Rutgers only to be dropped for a newer model somewhere between his bar exam and their son’s bar mitzvah.
A plaque on the wall read THIS TABLE RESERVED FOR TWO OR MORE PERSONS, as grad students would settle in here, order a cup of coffee, and stay for the whole night, bogarting the table with books and papers. Manton cracked, “I used to think that sign had something to do with impromptu Gentile church services they held in here: ‘wherever two or more are seated . . .’ ”
“God, you Jersey Jews can’t even get the guy’s lines right. It’s ‘wherever two or more are gathered in my name,’ not ‘gathered to scarf fries.’ ” On the way in, Mead had begun to feel fainthearted, wondering whether he really had the guts to go through with the mutiny. But the Swiss chocolate box scene recalled his purpose, the malt in his belly revived his strength, and the banter gave him heart. The vanilla walls and French vanilla ceiling (from ages of nicotine) gave the place a literal feel, old and mellow and milky wholesome. He said something to that effect.
“Yeah, all that’s missing is the cows themselves,” Manton said.
“Listen, Steve,” said James, suddenly urgent. “Speaking of livestock . . .”
Three mornings later Mead awakened to a peeled peach of a moon setting over a thousand acres of sunflowers, and he was in Colorado. After a bleary-eyed cheeseburger at a downtown Denver lunch counter, he took the final 246 miles on a fresh bus to Gunnison. As the coach crossed South Park, crested Highway 287, and passed over Monarch Pass, Mead could not help looking out the window in the vain hope of spotting October Carson, net in hand and burro in tow, along the thoroughfare. But the wanderer was nearly four years and a dozen passes
ahead of him. Those passes remained fresh in Mead’s mind: Cottonwood, Weston, and Boreas, Hoosier, Independence, Mosquito, and the great Cumberland. Each one sounded like Mount Parnassus to Mead.
He had transcribed several pages of notes on Erebia magdalena from Carson’s journal. Now, nearing the end of the line and nervous about what came next, he took them out to read. He found the part he liked best: “The butterflies are great. I’ll never tire of Maggie. But she’s got a rival in my mind: a face with no name. The brief encounters I’ve lived on for so long begin to seem wan, not to mention damned infrequent. I find myself longing for more than the occasional midnight mountain mating.”
“Amen!” Mead exclaimed, and the Baptist across the aisle nodded his approval. Mead lay his head back, reclined the seat as far as it would go, and conjured midnight mountain matings to come.
PART TWO
21
For three days and nights Mary slept in her piney monastery cell, getting up only for a pee, a drink, or a bowl of soup. After she finally arose and bathed, she sat near an open window. The alpine air was redolent of willows and peaty mire. The sensation that she was really here, in the longed-for, wept-over mountains, almost whelmed her.
When her mind cleared, she wondered what kind of place this was. The robes of her hosts suggested some sort of a religious order, but the book on her bedside table gave her pause. At first she took it for a Bible, but the title on the spine, Accepting the Universe: Essays in Naturalism, said otherwise. It was by John Burroughs, and it lay open to an essay entitled “The Faith of a Naturalist.” “I am persuaded that a man without religion falls short of the proper human ideal,” it began.
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